The creative minds behind the Night Vale Presents network are introducing new shows exploring the realm of music, continuing to push forward their unique take on audio drama and non-fiction shows.

Two new podcasts, I Only Listen to the Mountain Goatsand It Makes A Sound, premiere this fall, alongside season two of critical favorite Within the Wires. Each show offers a unique perspective on art and storytelling—using creativity as a launch pad for both conversation and discovery—a hallmark combination of the Night Vale universe. The central question that runs throughout each of these series: What happens to art when it is released into the world?

NEW FALL SEASON SHOWS:

I Only Listen to the Mountain Goats is a conversation series featuring Welcome to Night Vale and Alice Isn’t Deadcreator Joseph Fink and John Darnielle, the founder, lead singer, and songwriter for beloved indie-rock icons the Mountain Goats—and Fink’s own personal artistic hero. Together, Fink and Darnielle take the listener on a deep dive into the world of creativity and the duality of being an artist and a fan, both by sharing their own creative processes and music-geek obsessions and through immersive chats with other notable musicians and writers.

Season one of I Only Listen to the Mountain Goats focuses on the band’s seminal All Hail West Texas album from 2002, and the conversations range from introspective to intense, and are always revelatory.

“When I was a child, reading the authors that I loved and listening to music that I loved, the thing I got from that is that feeling of being understood somehow—that weird connection,” Darnielle confesses to Fink. “Where it’s not the person, it’s not the stranger, it’s this thing they’ve made that opens this space for self-reflection.”

Fink and Darnielle engage each other in conversation on everything from the smallest bits of Mountain Goats trivia—like the surprising inspiration for the “Hail Satan” lyrics on “The Best Ever Death Metal Band In Denton”—to big questions about philosophies toward creating art: Does it come from divine inspiration, or can creativity be treated as a day job?

As deeply political people, Fink and Darnielle also address current events and hot-button issues like immigration and the idea of sanctuary. They share their opinion on whether artists or works of art have a responsibility to respond to politics and political events.

To help tackle some of these larger topics, Fink and Darnielle invite other artistic leaders to discuss, debate, and share never-before-told stories about their own creative process, including best-selling YA author and music nerd John Green (The Fault in Our Stars) and Merge Records co-founder Mac McCaughan (Superchunk), as well as many special music guests such as Andrew Bird, Craig Finn, Laura Jane Grace, and Amanda Palmer, who offer up their opinions as well as new renditions of songs from All Hail West Texas.

Each episode of I Only Listen to the Mountain Goats will feature a cover song specifically recorded for this podcast. Merge Records will release a digital single of each cover when the corresponding podcast episode is released, starting with Laura Jane Grace’s cover of “The Best Ever Death Metal Band in Denton” on September 28. Merge will release the full set of covers of the entirety of All Hail West Texas as an album at the end of the season. I Only Listen to the Mountain Goats is a collaboration between Merge Records, Night Vale Presents, and the Mountain Goats.

The conversations on I Only Listen to the Mountain Goats reveal just how personal everyone’s connection to art is, and the music shows us that even if an artist is an originator of a piece of work, they never truly own it. We all do.

Season one of I Only Listen to the Mountain Goats premieres September 28, 2017 and episodes will be released every other week until March 29, 2018.

LikeI Only Listen to the Mountain Goats, Night Vale Presents’ new fiction show tackles the life of a songwriter, but from the flipside of the coin.It Makes A Sound explores what it means to love an artist and a work of art through a unique fictional perspective. The show poses the question: When was the last time you were struck by the truly extraordinary in your life, and do you remember the key that unlocked the infinite possibilities of the universe to you?

Deirdre Gardner, who has returned home to the now-abandoned golf course community she grew up in, discovers “the answer” in a dusty attic: a cassette tape from 1992 that is the only known recording of forgotten local musical icon Wim Faros. Over nine episodes, It Makes A Sound follows Deirdre’s tenacious pursuit to honor Wim’s legacy—a quest to revive the soundtrack to her generation.

Narrated, created, and co-directed by Jacquelyn Landgraf (actor, writer, director, and downtown theater curio; a longtime member of the New York Neo-Futurists), with original music by Nate Weida and co-directed by Anya Saffir, It Makes A Sound explores themes of love, loneliness, and longing and reminds us of something that lives intimately in our memory.

“I think a universality of the show is that everybody has been lonely in their own nostalgia,” says Landgraf, “everybody had a teenage crush, everyone’s had love and admiration for someone that was and will forever be unrequited.”

Youthful exuberance told through the lens of a gifted storyteller, all set to the single-copy soundtrack of Wim Faros. While It Makes A Sound’s songwriter is fictional, the podcast will unlock memories and feelings from your own youth.

Season one of It Makes A Sound, which also features the voices of Annie Golden (Orange Is the New Black, Hair), Siobhan Fallon (Saturday Night Live, Wayward Pines), and other special guests, launches on September 24, 2017 with new episodes every two weeks through January 9, 2018.

Night Vale Presents’ fictional found-audio drama, Within the Wires, returns with a new story told from an alternate universe. Season two, “Museum Audio Tours,” tells its story in the guise of ten audio museum guides. Over the course of a decade of worldwide exhibitions, these walkthroughs explore the complex relationship between the narrator, journalist, and artist Roimata Mangakāhia (voiced by actress Rima Te Wiata of Hunt for the Wilderpeople and Housebound), and her mentor, esteemed artist Claudia Atieno, while unraveling the mystery of the latter’s disappearance.

Season two of Within the Wires, “Museum Audio Tours,” serves as a prequel to season one’s breakout hit “Relaxation Tapes” and premiered on September 5, 2017 with new episodes every two weeks through January 14, 2018.

All three podcasts will be available for free on Apple Podcasts, RadioPublic, and wherever listeners can access podcasts.

ABOUT NIGHT VALE PRESENTS

Inspired to “keep finding new ways to tell stories within what is still a very young medium,” Joseph Fink and Jeffrey Cranor launched the Night Vale Presents network in early 2016, continuing their mission to encourage independent podcasting from writers and artists who haven’t worked in the format before. The cornerstone of the network is Welcome to Night Vale, which has grown to be one of the most downloaded podcasts in the world since its debut in 2012, and has garnered over 170 million downloads. Welcome to Night Vale holds live shows around the world and the first Welcome to Night Vale novel, a New York Times Bestseller written by Fink and Cranor, will be followed by a new book on October 17.

Night Vale Presents’ other fictional series—Alice Isn’t Dead, Within The Wires, and The Orbiting Human Circus (of the Air)­—all debuted in the Apple Podcasts Top 10. The network’s most recent original show, the non-fiction series Conversations with People Who Hate Me, launched in July to critical and listener acclaim. For more information, go to www.nightvalepresents.com.

ABOUT JOHN DARNIELLE OF THE MOUNTAIN GOATS

John Darnielle is the singer from the Mountain Goats and a New York Times bestselling novelist whose sophomore novel Universal Harvester was released in February. His debut novel, Wolf in White Van, was nominated for a National Book Award, and was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for first fiction. The Mountain Goats are on tour now in support of their critically acclaimed new album, Goths. For information on that and more, go to www.mountain-goats.com.

A new podcast taps into the fractious side of the web by fostering conversations over the divide. Produced by theNight Vale Presents creative team, Dylan Marron’s Conversations with People Who Hate Me has a simple premise: what would people actually say if you reached out and talked to them about the hateful comments they posted about you online? In each episode, Marron engages in a dialogue with the people who sent him hateful messages—learning about them, their views, and why they felt the need to tell Marron that he is, according to one guest, the “most pathetic person on the internet.” The new podcast series will launch with a ten-episode season and run weekly starting July 31.

Marron is an IFP Gotham Award and Drama Desk-nominated writer, performer and video creator. He has been exploring the power of the internet through shows such as Unboxing, Sitting in Bathrooms with Trans People (IFP Gotham Award Nominee), Shutting Down Bullshit, and Every Single Word (Tumblr’s “Most Viral Blog” of 2015; Shorty Award Nominee). Marron, who has more than 175,000 fans on social media, has produced, written and hosted these socially-minded digital interview shows focusing on racism, homophobia, transphobia, and police brutality. For all of the followers who champion his work, there are a handful who respond with hateful commentary.

In Conversations with People Who Hate Me, Marronexplores the power of anonymity, the convergence of different views, and what the virulent criticisms and personal attacks reveal about how we engage with each other online.What he discovers is as varied as the commentators themselves:

the 18-year-old Texan who called Marron a “moron” but revealed that high school had been hell for him because of the bullying; the conversation evolves into a discussion about how hurt people hurt people;

the Midwestern, Christian college student who says he loves Marron but hates his sin of homosexuality;

the middle-aged Trump supporter who while standing by his conservative views, softens his criticisms of Marron’s work;

the fellow queer person of color who attacked Marron for having a white husband. They discuss why people attack their own kind and how sometimes the call can be coming from inside the house;

the elementary school teacher in the South who shamed Dylan for exclusively interviewing guests with left-leaning political views that matched his, throughout the conversations she came to realize he was doing the opposite;

the Australian teen who called Marron “the most pathetic person on the internet” and goes on to say he hates feminism and the left. By the time the conversation has ended they’ve taken on why feminism matters and why a women-only Wonder Woman screening might not be the worst thing in the world.

He envisions the series as an alternative way to respond to the political and cultural climate today—tackling as he observes, “the macro environment by focusing on the microcosmic division thriving in comment sections throughout the internet.” In the end Marron reflects, “I think there’s more value to listening to people’s stories than finding ways to shut people down or attacking them.”

Marron, whose body of work focuses on video, decided to create this series as a podcast so his audience could experience these conversations without the temptation of a comment section. Additionally, he wanted to give space for listeners to contemplate the perspective of his guests without knowing what they look like. The conversations range and circle back, they are revelatory and surprising, funny and deeply moving.

He went about choosing his guests as safely as he could by only reaching out to those whose comments had not tipped into physical threats in the real world. By searching their social media profiles, he used a wider lens to understand the individuals in their everyday lives. Not everyone he asked agreed to speak with him—and those who did found themselves vacillating—Did they really mean what they said on online? Was this a trap? Some didn’t stick around long enough to find out it wasn’t.

As Nicholas Quah writes in Vulture, “It’s a compelling, high-wire concept, and one that brings to a whole other level (and maybe ends up deconstructing) the idea of ‘engaging in dialogue’ with ‘someone who disagrees with you.’ Marron’s work is consistently whip-smart and deeply aware of the multilayered nature of things; one expects to see all of that baked into this upcoming project.”

The first season of Marron’s show will be available for free on Apple Podcasts, RadioPublic, and wherever listeners can access podcasts.

ABOUT DYLAN MARRON

Dylan Marron is an IFP Gotham Award & Drama Desk-nominated writer, performer, and video maker. He is the voice of Carlos the scientist on the hit podcast Welcome to Night Vale, an alum of the New York Neo Futurists, and the creator of Every Single Word (Tumblr's "Most Viral Blog" of 2015; Shorty Award Nominee), a video series that edits down popular films to only feature the words spoken by people of color. He was most recently a writer and correspondent at Seriously.tv, where he created Sitting in Bathrooms with Trans Peopl, Shutting Down Bullsh*, and the Unboxing series. Marron has over 175,000 fans on social media and blends activism with entertainment, making the most complex issues accessible to a wide variety of audiences. For more on Dylan Marron go towww.dylanmarron.com.

Night Vale Presents, the creative team behind the wildly popular fiction podcasts Welcome to Night Vale, Alice Isn’t Dead, Within The Wires, and The Orbiting Human Circus (of the Air), announce today plans to launch two new non-fiction podcasts. The network is continuing to work with well-known artists who have not worked in podcasting before while identifying ways to tell new and creative stories in the non-fiction space.

The first podcast, Conversations with People Who Hate Me, features IFP Gotham Award & Drama Desk-nominated writer, performer, and video creator Dylan Marron who has spent the last few years making social justice videos and receiving hateful messages online about them. In each episode, Marron engages in a dialogue with the people who sent him these hateful messages—learning about them, their views, and why they felt the need to tell Marron that he’s “the most pathetic person on the internet.”

Marron, who has a large social media following, has produced, written and hosted entertaining, socially-minded, digital interview shows focusing on racism, homophobia, transphobia, and police brutality. Some examples include Unboxing, Sitting in Bathrooms with Trans People, Shutting Down Bullshit, andEvery Single Word(Tumblr’s “Most Viral Blog” of 2015; Shorty Award Nominee), a video series that edits down popular films to only feature the words spoken by people of color.

The first season will consist of 10 episodes and run weekly starting July 31. It will be available for free on Apple Podcasts, RadioPublic, and wherever listeners can access podcasts.

The second podcast series, I Only Listen to The Mountain Goats, is hosted by The Mountain Goats lead singer, writer, and novelist, John Darnielle, and co-creator of Welcome to Night Vale, Joseph Fink. The first season will follow The Mountain Goats’ iconic album, All Hail West Texas, with each episode focused on one song from the album and featuring a conversation about songwriting, storytelling, and current events. Each episode will also premiere a cover version of a Mountain Goats song, by artists such as Andrew Bird, Sylvan Esso, and Amanda Palmer.

I Only Listen to The Mountain Goats is scheduled to be released this fall in partnership with Merge Records. Last month, The Mountain Goats released their sixteenth studio album, Goths, to critical acclaim. In a review of the album, Pitchfork noted, “At this point in his career, Darnielle is in his own private league of songwriting.”

Of the two new shows, Fink says “Night Vale Presents was founded on the idea of finding exceptionally talented artists and helping them enter this form we love, podcasting. We're excited to continue this focus as we expand Night Vale Presents for the first time into the world of non-fiction.”